At Home with Derek Fowlds

Our feature-length documentary, At Home with Derek Fowlds takes a close look at the life and work of one of our best loved actors, who became a household name appearing as Mr Derek alongside the boisterous Basil Brush, as Bernard Woolley, the pedantic civil servant in the hugely popular political satire, Yes, Minister, and later Yes, Prime Minister, and then for 18 years, as Sergeant Oscar Blaketon in the long-running TV drama, Heartbeat. This book provides an introduction to the documentary and the full script, including a summary of each scene and the dialogue from the interviews used in the film. We've included a selection of research notes that we compiled to help gives us a deeper understanding of the people and productions that he worked on, and we've also included a range of images from the film, including Derek showing us around his home and pointing out many of the personal mementos that he'd accumulated during his 60 years in showbusiness. As a bonus, we've also included the script for In Conversation: Derek Fowlds, an impromptu interview that we recorded with Derek in 2018, which provides a little more background to some of Derek's wonderful stories. At Home with Derek Fowlds was recorded in 2019 and has become the last project that Derek worked on before he sadly passed away in January 2020. During the film, Derek is joined by his friend and novelist, Michael Sellers, who helped him to write his entertaining autobiography, A Part Worth Playing, and his partner, Helen makes a brief appearance too. Derek was the perfect interviewee, full of stories, all delivered with style and a little mischievous tongue-in-cheek. We've dedicated the documentary and this book to the memory of our dear friend, the wonderful, Derek Fowlds.